While waxing lyrical
in Chapter 9 about some of my outdoor recreational activities in the
winter of 1947, my thoughts turned to what we children wore for such
experiences, as well as for other more mundane doings, around that time.
Inevitably this reminded me, not only of the informal language of the
street that had described what we wore, but also the words that my
parents had used at home. In the Banknock context, and in the many other
far-flung places to which my widespread travels through life have taken
me, I have absorbed a complex range of speech. However, the dominant
influences in the 1940s were, the local people’s slang, my father’s
Forfarshire turn of phrase in North-East of Scotland doric, my mother’s
use of Falkirk dialectal variations, and, of course, the King’s English,
and thus speaking ‘properly’ as befitted a highly educated household.

Sliding on ice in the
school playground called for well tackit and seggit leather
boots. The wellington boots favoured for sledging and messing about in
puddles on rainy days were banned as sure-fire ways of dummying the
glass-honed frosted tracks!

From an early age I
was introduced to a shoemaker’s ‘last’ and instructed how, with segs
and tacks, to protect boots and shoes from daily abuse … such
as, walking with one’s weight outwards [both dad and I were bow-legged
[hid bow-hoched oar bandy legs!] which caused the heels of shoes
to wear down badly on one side … and from sclaffing by careless
bairns off dykes, pavements, and of course fur fitba
and slides in both summer and winter time etc.

My Classmate Neil
Howieson’s Boots and Stockings

If I start from the
feet and work upwards, I should not only give some impression of what
was common apparel then, but also the words that were associated with
such clobber. Foot was fit and toe was tae, but I
can’t think of anything else but feet for more than one fit!
However the plural of toe was taes. My mother used to say, “I’ll
flype your stockings John (turn them inside-out)
to help you pull them on more easily.” When they needed darned she used
a toadstool and matching wool to cross-stitch them. My father would call
that toadstool a puddock-steel.

The top edges of my
wellies and bottom edges of my short trousers (breeks) when
wet in cold weather burned my bare legs and thighs red raw and my mother
would say, “I’ll need to put vaseline on your scaady legs.”
[This continued
until I was fourteen when I eventually got my very first pair of long
trousers!] She
called my dad’s and my short draars, underpants, and our lang
draars, ‘Long-Johns’. I also knew that she wore corsets which we
boys and girls in local parlance called steys! Our trousers were
held up by braces otherwise known as galluses and dad’s working
overalls for the garden were dungarees in local slang, but my mum
called them “dongarees”!

Posh men and women of
course used suspenders to hold up their stockings beneath their trousers
or skirts, while small boys like me (thank goodness) were given rubber
bands or elastic bands or ribbon or string tie-ups in order to
stop us constantly having to howk them up from aboot oor
ainkles to just below the knee. This constant practice, as I learned
later, was not too good for one’s circulation!

Our male upper bodies
had a first covering of a vest which most folks called a semmit or
simmit. My dad referred to his shirt as a sark only to be
nagged by my mum that that was not a proper word for the nice formal
shirts she so painstakingly washed and ironed for him to go with his
collar, collar-stud, tie and cuff-links worn for church and special
occasions etc.

Dad’s favourite word
for a woolly cardigan was kirseckie, for which I have yet to find
a source location; although I think the origin of ‘cardigan’ comes from
caird for wool, and gansey for a sailor’s woollen jersey
jumper (slang) … probably both arising from the Channel Islands,
Jersey and Guernsey also. I was so impressed by the word kirseckie,
which my Aunt Neta also used frequently, that I recently composed a
doric poem about it.[see
below] Dad and
Aunt Neta grew up in Longforgan, Carse of Gowrie and in Justinhaugh,
Forfar, so it might be part of the doric for either of these two areas.

We had jaikets
and blazers and Burberry raincoats and leather jerkins, all of
them ready to put on over jumpers and kirseckies … and,
available with all such coverings, we had the extra comfort of woolly scerfs and
doddy-mittens
(gloves without separate fingers except for the thumbs)
strung from one hand through that arm of coats etc. and round the back
of our necks to emerge for the other hand. This was in case we children
might lose the precious gloves by leaving them lying around and
forgetting where we had put them down.

All this was topped
off with a woolly helmet or Balaclava … an item our sticky-oot lugs
really appreciated in thoan snell winter days in Banknock in the
1940s.

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